


we are old enough to have earned a larger country

by feralphoenix



Category: Yggdra Union
Genre: Dysphoria, M/M, Misgendering, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-27
Updated: 2014-01-27
Packaged: 2018-01-10 06:27:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1156220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Taking his original flesh back would mean being able to assume all his true powers. It's just that the drawbacks would be so serious, Nessiah isn't sure he really wants to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we are old enough to have earned a larger country

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hazardia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hazardia/gifts).



> _(Arms out in the rain_ – please have her get out and run off the page to where the words ‘happy’ and ‘good’ will never find her)

“Nessiah,” Gulcasa says.

You can’t look at him. That’s probably making things worse on you in the long run—his sensitivity to your moods is as impossible as any of your own terrible survival mechanisms—but so things stand.

“I won’t lie to you and tell you that I do not have mixed feelings,” you say, and look at the temple floor. “That would be tantamount to insult at this point, I think. But I don’t think I can talk about it. Not yet. If things are—if I do indeed have to make a choice, then.”

He’s quiet for a long time, and then:

“Okay,” he says, and sits next to you.

 

 

You think back on how your first transmigration should have been such a shock but was a relief instead.

It had surprised the Yumel for your new body to come out so differently. You think you too would have been surprised, if it had not been for the wondrous realization that suddenly you could breathe without your chest feeling too heavy—that the psychological imprint of your wounds keeping you scarred and one-eyed and all, that even though you were disfigured and by all accounts hideous, you could look at yourself and not want to cry for the first time since you hit puberty.

 

 

You think back to explaining to Gulcasa how the soul informs the body, that you are blind and scarred for ever because these things make up such a part of who you know you are.

You think about the panic and the revulsion from the day when those delinquent boys called out to you, and how the way you nearly killed them was half your fear of being touched, and half the old hatred of wearing a descriptor that never fit you.

Beside you Gulcasa is tall and his shoulders are broad. You wonder if things would have been easier for you if you had been able to wish that you were like that—wish that you had that kind of body instead of just the extra weight disappearing and the emptiness filling in.

But you wouldn’t be able to make yourself into something that you can’t recognize. With all your genius, all your experience—you have the form that you have now, have a name and a body that you prefer—because this is what you recognize as yourself.

And people have mistaken Gulcasa, too, because of his hair. It isn’t about one’s stature and muscles. If there is some magic to always being read rightly, it is a magic unknown to you.

 

 

You are very tired of being powerless. You are tired of your magic running dry and your body being feeble and limiting you. Even if you didn’t mean to take revenge for what has been done to you, you would want your strength back because it is rightfully yours.

But it’s only the strength you want to take away. You don’t need the baggage back.

 

 

It’s not fear of rejection that prevents you from saying this (it is, but you know it’s nonsensical; Gulcasa has stayed by your side through bigger revelations than the little footnote that your sex and gender didn’t always match), but a reluctance to make it real by putting it into words.

“I need to know what my options are,” you say. “I need to know what my options are and—have time to consider them. Consider how I feel about them. That’s all.”

“Okay,” Gulcasa says, and holds your hand while you take a steadying breath.

 

 

 

_(when what awaits you is a spiral of bleached-white crumbling bones wrapped in orichalcum chains, you laugh and laugh and keep laughing until your hysteria nearly causes you to faint: all this time, and you never really had to worry._

_“I can work with this,” you say between giggles. “This isn’t so bad.”)_


End file.
